


The Space Between the Walls

by Anna__S



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: Jealousy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-30
Updated: 2014-10-30
Packaged: 2018-02-23 05:04:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2535197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anna__S/pseuds/Anna__S
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tonight he’s getting answers to some of his questions, but in all the wrong ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Space Between the Walls

**Author's Note:**

> For Gloria Gilbert Patch’s kink challenge, although calling this kinky is a pretty impressive stretch of the imagination. Set immediately following The Girl Next Door.

 

That night, Danny watches the woman he loves go on a first date and if that’s not a metaphor for his life, he doesn’t know what is.  

Through the dim half-light of the street lamp, he can make out their shapes, but not their faces. Mindy is lying on her side, her body pointed at Charlie like a comma. 

He loves her. This epiphany feels like it should change everything, but it somehow changes nothing at all. They are still exactly the same people they’ve always been.  

If he could redo the unfinished sentence of their relationship, take those days back and start over, he would make the same mistakes, but this time he would tell her a more precise truth: that he’s no good at this.  That he takes the people he loves and does his best to mold them into something else. He would take everything about her that he loves, her unflagging enthusiasm, her shallow, fervent passions, her essential Mindy-ness, and turn them into something that he hated.

He’s good at taking care of the people he loves: he knows how to pay the bills, how to show up on time, how to be everything his father wasn’t. But anything else still feels like it’s in a language he never learned. Installing Mindy in this apartment, showing her how a mortgage actually works, buying her those damn groceries; that felt like his half of the only bargain he knows how to keep. 

Maybe if they both just silently agreed to stay single, to hold onto each other in simple, unspoken ways, it could be enough. But Mindy apparently didn’t get that message.

He drags himself away from the window, in part, because something is clenching, low in his stomach, but mostly because if she looks up, and catches him staring at them, he has no idea what she’ll do. And her new boyfriend carries a gun.

His nighttime rituals are soothing, like a good church service. The sameness is a balm: toothbrush, floss, face wash, q-tips, contacts. 

At the same time last night, her presence next door was pleasing.  He liked to picture her moving through the motions of getting ready, removing her make-up, using those mysterious tools that always seemed to be multiplying in her sink. Tonight, it feels like a splinter under his skin. Not painful exactly, but present.

He pulls back the covers, briefly contemplating lying in the middle of the bed, but instead slips into his customary place, leaving half the bed untouched, pulled smooth, an oasis of calm. 

His eyes are just starting to droop down when he’s pulled out of his hazy half-sleep by a peal of laughter. He can’t quite make out the words, just the easy cadence of the conversation and the familiar chirp of her voice.

He closes his eyes again, trying to wish the sound away.  What kind of cheap walls are these anyway, probably constructed by some half-assed contractor in the pocket of the unions. 

There’s a soft thump against the wall. 

For one brief optimistic moment, he thinks that Mindy’s hanging pictures, except even Mindy isn’t socially tone-deaf enough to do that at midnight on a Wednesday and then there’s another thump, and this time he can hear the bed scraping against the floor, moving in a distinctive rhythm.

He freezes, going perfectly still as he absorbs the blow, the pain of it moving through him like an electric shock, making his entire body clench. When it ends, his hands are balled into fists at his side, and his jaw is working, his teeth grinding against each other.   

This feels like cruelty, but while he could, and has, used a lot of words to describe Mindy, cruel isn’t one of them. So this is something else, maybe something worse, a kind of indifference.

They're together in his apartment, in the bed that he bought, in the sheets that he laid out for her, tucking each corner into crisp triangles. He tries to force the thought away, using the superior Castellano strength of will, but it plays on a loop.  He could send her a furious text or knock on her door, hell he could break down her door, he's got murder running through his blood, but he doesn't know how to stop this without making himself painfully vulnerable.  

He’s nauseous, like he’s going to be sick, but that’s not the only thing he feels. His body is too well trained, too used to responding to her. He can feel his heartbeat quickening.  

She moans again and his dick twitches. 

The mattress is squeaking now, adding to the bumps and breathy moans, like a chorus designed to drive him insane.

He should leave the bedroom, leave the apartment, leave the City, even New Jersey might be better than this.  He squeezes his eyes shut, but that just brings the noises into starker relief. 

And in the darkness of the ceiling, he can picture her, eyes shining, wide like saucers, her body twisting to the side so he can leave a trail of kisses down her sensitive back, on the spot that makes her squirm.  He can almost taste the sweet, cloying taste of her skin.

At some point, when he wasn’t paying attention, his hand slipped under the loose elastic of his boxers, and his hand is now moving to his dick, already half-hard.  

He knows what she looks like naked and he knows how she likes to be kissed, soft, then forcefully, but he didn’t know if her voice would get low or high, if she would close her eyes or pull him closer; tonight he’s getting answers to some of his questions, but in all the wrong ways.  

His fingers moves all the way down the length of his cock, his thumb rubbing over the head, and then down again. The comforter moves up and down like a wave.   

His hand is rough and chapped, and there’s too much friction, it chafes, almost hurts, but maybe it’s better that way; it matches the hot knot of anger in his throat.

The word fuck cuts through the walls, like a knife. Then again, _fuck._ Could be an adjective or a verb. 

He thinks about Amy, just one flight down. She would help drown out these noises, and her soft hands would be a step up from his.  She had great breasts and enough enthusiasm for both of them. But there’s a trail of tangled lies between them that he can’t quite figure out how to undo. Besides, he’s a little too far along to show up at her door.

He tries to imagine her face instead of Mindy's, but there's no avoiding it, there's no way of getting away from her groans and whispers. He thinks about the way her mouth was shaped when she said Charlie's name. Her voice soft and husky. How it just rolled off her lips, like it had nothing to do with him.

His hand is moving in pace with her low moans, picking up speed as the thumps turn into thuds.

His free hand clamps down onto his leg, his fingernails digging into his thigh like it’s her, like he could touch her, like he could hurt her. 

The muscles in his calves spasm and tic, his left leg rising an inch off the bed as his entire body tenses. His dick looks violently red against his pale fingers. His hand is moving in a blur. 

He finishes before them in one last hard, frantic tug, thrusting uselessly into the air, imagining he’s pushing into her, that there’s something soft to catch him, something that could absorb his rage and his need.  Instead, he comes into his hand and his boxers, a single fat white drop escaping onto his stomach.

He sags into the bed, letting out a long shuddering breath. 

Through the wall, there’s one more moan and a deep grunt, one final complaining screech from the mattress and then silence.  It should feel like a relief, but it doesn’t. 

He slips the boxers off, using them as a towel before throwing them in the direction of his laundry basket.

There’s always that twinge of guilt, leftover from his days as an altar boy, but today it’s sharper. This was an even less sacred form of sin than usual.

He closes his eyes, finally, but it’s not a release, it's not an escape; he knows what he will dream of. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt was: sometime around "Girl Next Door", Mindy is still living next door to Danny but sleeping with Charlie. Somehow Danny can hear then going at it, and it makes him jealous but also super turned on.
> 
> I turned a kink challenge into angst. I'm so sorry. I'm the worst at this.


End file.
